Weekend box office: Star Wars and The Revenant battle the weather

Brad SturdivantJanuary 24th, 2016

In terms of box office numbers, there’s just not much you can do when a terrible winter storm rips through over a third of the country. When over 300 theaters close down, it’s going to have a significant impact on the weekend box office numbers. It’s hard to even analyze what happened because all of the numbers are skewed. For example, DIRTY GRANDPA was completely trashed by critics, but even with an estimated 60 million people held up indoors, the film still managed to snag $11.3 million. That’s not much, but given the situation, it’s actually pretty impressive. The same thing can be said for THE BOY and THE 5TH WAVE, which are flirting with $10 million. But if everything falls into place, THE REVENANT should edge out STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS. Speaking of Star Wars, it’s total domestic haul is around $875 million, so it’s still chasing $1 billion.

Next week sees the return of the chubby panda in KUNG FU PANDA 3, which should easily take the weekend box office. It has zero competition and it has been a while since we’ve had a kids movie hit theaters. We also get THE FINEST HOURS, which I think looks pretty good, but I’m concerned with the late January release date. It’s the kind of movie that should get a late fall release and the fact it didn’t tells me there’s something about it that doesn’t work. Next, the latest spoof movie, FIFTY SHADES OF BLACK comes out and it looks awful, but we’ll see how it does at the theater. Finally, there’s JANE GOT A GUN and I’m not even sure what to think of this one. Without all the production problems, I would have said it should be great, but I’m pretty sure the movie is cursed. Note: the numbers below will be updated as they become final.